Tuesday, 16 October 2012

Stephen Jay Gould, a polemicist of science, who was recently hoisted on his own petard, wrote a book 'The Panda's Thumb' wherein one chapter was dedicated to women's brains, or the lack thereof when compared to men's. A woman called Maria Montessorri featured at the end of his essay. Gould writes of her:

She measured the circumference of children's heads in herschools and inferred that the best prospects had bigger brains. But she had no use for Broca's conclusions about women. She discussed Manouvrier's work at length and made much of his tentative claim that women, after proper correction of the data, had slightly larger brains than men. Women, she concluded, were intellectually superior, but men had prevailed heretofore by dint of physical force.

And Gould then went quoting her at length:

Since technology has abolished force as an instrument of power, the era of women may soon be upon us: "In such an epoch there will really be superior human beings, there will really be men strong in morality and in sentiment. Perhaps in this way the reign of women is approaching, when the enigma of her anthropological superiority will be deciphered. Woman was always the custodian of human sentiment, morality and honor."

And then there is the more serious way of saying women were chattel: they went from their fathers and brothers to their husbands and sons(see they moved!) with the involvement of wealth(and see property, patrimony, matrimony, QED bigot!), without the sex-in-the-city woo-girl lesbian-experimentalist phase that is a fundamental right of womankind.

The perspective that women were property sounds quite absurd when male resources is a common point in discussions of mate-selection. Property, wealth, money, doesn't exactly sound what men look for in a woman, isn't that what the 'strong and independent'™ women bewail about?

If women didn't exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.

The lack of male prostitution, notwithstanding the "buying women" stupidity that feminists use, is another hint.

The existence of Coverture where the legal identity of woman was subsumed into her husband's when they married, the feme sole converting to feme covert, following which her earnings and whatever she brought into the marriage went to her husband and became his property and not hers, OMG patriarchy was really evil!

This state of affairs was to continue until a brave lady by the name of Caroline Norton appeared on the scene, rather disappeared from her husband's scene, much to his chagrin.

Wikipedia recounts her property grievance:

In 1836, Caroline left her husband.Caroline managed to subsist on her earnings as an author, but Norton claimed these as his own, arguing successfully in court that, as her husband, Caroline's earnings were legally his.

and how unfair the law was towards wives, yet Mrs. Norton certainly gave back as good as she got:

Paid nothing by her husband, her earnings confiscated, Caroline used the law to her own advantage. Running up bills in her husband's name, Caroline told the creditors when they came to collect, that if they wished to be paid, they could sue her husband.

LOLZ patriarchy hoisted on its own petard!

Oh wait...

Why did the creditors could sue her husband and not her?

The answer is provided in stark contrast when one considers what Mrs Norton's orgy of tears led to. Married Women's Property Act, a law by which married women could keep their property to themselves and only themselves like other women could, all is well and equal, innit? NOT!

First wave feminist equality in full effect. FREEDOM from pater-archy!!

So the freedom that feminists want is a freedom from responsibility when it comes to interaction with men. And of course, the same rights that a man has. Logical contradictions are for the weak-minded.

Reason exists for those who cannot go on living without clinging to it.
-Aizen Sosuke

Feminism and "Feminism is not a monolith" being just a power play where men are in the wrong regardless of what women do. If you are not a feminist, you're a bad person. Become a feminist and indulge yourself in the orgy of women-empowerment and the subsequent screeching amongst feminists as to how this empowerment can be attained(Note for phallus-bearers, keep your mouth shut so that women's voices could be heard!).

So men shouldered responsibility before too, but now are sent off to jail in the name of child support(so sad too bad, you should have kept your dick in your pants, Mr. Oppressor!) andhave no power/authority against that responsibility(and that's the way we do gender-equality, bigot!), times they are a-changing'!

Of course that doesn't go very far when State is much more than mere military and almost a provider husband for many women, election issues can devolve into the inanity of "War on Women", and in our enlightened brave new world in which women can be soldiers too, bigot, at least equal and sometimes better than men.

Wednesday, 10 October 2012

The term male-dominated is commonly bandied about as if there was a version of history which went like this:

Every man-made or rather human-made institution fell from space, and men being men, ran into the more prestigious ones and then locked the doors after them. Women being poor runners and with the additional handicap of being pregnant and with babies stuck to their udders were then not let in.It was only after an orgy of thousand tears that they were allowed and lo-and-behold today we have the feminist movement correcting for all those years of male-dominated inequality.

Or should we consider that there is another version of history that can be understood after you use this definition of feminism:

Feminism is a power grab by (man-hating) women called feminists who have the chutzpah to claim that they have done the most for women by simply positing themselves as a necessary intermediary between transfers of knowledge/resources/technology/opportunities from men to women, and then disparaging and working towards eradicating the source.

‘I looked into the Hellfire, and the majority of its dwellers were women
who were ungrateful.’ It was asked, ‘Did they disbelieve in (i.e. were
ungrateful to ] Allah?’ He replied, ‘They were ungrateful to their
husbands and were ungrateful for favors and the good deeds done for
them. If you had always been good to one of them and then she saw
something in you not to her liking, she would say, ‘I have never seen
any good from you at all.”

The shamelessness with which feminists cry "women were denied education" is a sight to behold. Most of them do reject the fiction of a male God which they say is used to perpetuate the patriarchal beast, but apparently a/the divine father in heavens sent down a thing called "education" to all equally but men kept it only to themselves. And brainwashed women into being mothers and "primary care-givers", a term that is stupid because of its existence.
So let's see, becoming a mother and wife = patriarchal brainwashing,
20 or more years of education = FREEDOM!

What makes people believe this sort of nonsense?

Feminism's "strong and independent" women throw off the patriarchal yoke and then run into the very bastions of patriarchy to be taught how to become strong and independent.Sexist to have a males-only university, women were not allowed into prestigious learning institutions, and the good women called feminists allowed women in, feminists fought for women's right to education! Right? Right!

History in a nutshell (Angry Harry)

These women did not build their own institutions, but shamelessly clamored for the "right" to go into men's even though they merely had to copy what had already been put in place by men and not to start from the primordial scratch.
And for this they are women's liberators?

Women won the right to vote. Oh lordy, and since women couldn't vote, men voted for it. This is women's struggle, this pitiable and laughably aggrandized greed for power that is built upon lies, utter solipsism and a victimhood that shows no signs of waning, feminism's raison d'etre?

Their expropriation is not merely content with getting into old boys' network, but then justifies affirmative-action on the grounds that men were its beneficiaries for thousands of years, the time during which patriarchy ruled the roost, before feminism appeared to take us back to the egalitarian world of matriarchy(logical contradictions are trifles that feminists don't deal with), the utter shamelessness of these ingrates is breathtaking!

As for the fiction of equality, it is to be merely used in this way:Declare yourself equal to an apple-farmer. Then in the name of equality, you deserve half the apples, and a bit more to make up for the time during which you are unequal. Oh and since he is now driving a tractor, no matter whether he was using a plough before, you deserve the inviolable right to be the tractor driver. And he should put up an AC in the driver's chamber unless he wants an hostile workplace lawsuit. Any murmur of discontent is proof of farmer-privilege.

State is their father, or mother, or the androgynous/genderless being that their acolytes can be sufficiently comfortable with. State is the replacement for the pie-in-the-sky bearded old white man and jesus rolled in one, which sends down education to them, teachers being the priests of this religion.
And having a good priest is necessary to save one from Newton's rape manual, or introducing gently the other such howlers from the Lord-of-Flies-esque place called women's studies department.

Is there a better definition of feminism? Is one being too harsh on feminists here?

In simple words, truth is an expedient, merely to be used when it's useful to do so, to be disregarded when not. An example would be women being "second-class citizens".
The word citizen is merely used to gain advantage and it's not as if feminists care about being citizens when they are more concerned about women in other countries than men in their own.
Traitors is more like it.

Despite the proclamations about universal sisterhood, women aren't exactly beholden to other women, let alone feminists. The brouhaha when a woman like Marissa Meyer refuses to bow at the altar of feminism gives us a hint.
Despite protestations to the contrary, feminism's overwhelming success was brought about by the fact that men are overwhelmingly philogynists instead of the other way round.
After all, it wasn't women who voted for women's suffrage.

By positing itself as a necessary intermediary between men and women, without which men would be undisputed rulers and women undisputed slaves, feminism commands the obedience of every woman, especially those with the power of influence. It's cute to hear feminists talk of opportunities for women, while using sleights of language like "technological advances", "march of science", "medical progress" to hide where these opportunities originated from in the first place.
After all, Mary Wollstonecraft wasn't exactly taught to read and write by aliens of the UFO kind. Contrary to feminist belief, education didn't exactly fall from space(or protruded from gaia's womb), nor did the washing machine.

And despite the proclamations about universal sisterhood, the biggest enemies of feminism have been other women, women like Phyllis Schalfly or Esther Vilar. And why shouldn't it be so, when it's women who can easily discern the daggers that lie behind the sweet words of other women, while the incorrigible buffoon that is man falls for them hook, line and sinker.

However, this women-women split cannot be acknowledged openly by feminists for then they lose the very useful narrative of "a misogynist is a man who opposes benefits to womankind and the purveyors of these benefits, which is feminism" and risk inviting men into this intra-sex struggle. It's not hard to see which side men would take, the campaign to see beauty in ugliness notwithstanding.

Thus the movement proceeds by brainwashing girls the way it accuses the mythical beast of patriarchy of, inciting them with propaganda akin to Torches of Freedom ("ya think girls can't do so and so? sexist, chauvinistic pig!"), claiming ever more benefits for women against men(which suspiciously always end up arguing for more positions of power after shoehorning women into places they would otherwise won't go, for e.g. suffrage, higher education), and if finally men register their discontent, it's only proof of the misogyny that they've been hiding all along.

"Oh look, a man angry at losing his male-privilege!"

Apparently the champions of the right of men to show emotions don't want them to show any. Or perhaps they do, but the emotions should be of the weepy kind; after all it's the 21st century, breaking the stereotypes and all that. But we digress.

Perhaps it is now amply clear what the title is supposed to stand for.

Consider a nerd who has convinced the jocks that they are only breaking their bones for getting used by chicks.
And they could take a stand against this oppression by organizing a communal fellatio.

A suicide bomber who has no love for life, not merely taking out those who do but convincing them to turn into suicide bombers themselves and to go even further, being proud of it.

Penis near my..er..a woman's vagina? Rape!

While the War against Women rhetoric is quite funny, even funnier still is women themselves waging a successful war against the tyranny of their wombs and against their own identity after being told that it's patriarchally constructed. And they can be free if they become copycats of men!
After all, it isn't men rushing in to trade their pants for skirts.

Thus the biggest success of feminism is not domestication of man or rather convincing boys to not grow into one, but the victory over their arch-enemies from their own sex to such an extent that their daughters now repeat feminist jargon against their own self-interests, if they can ever realize where they lie. Or say they support the right of a woman to have a 'choice' when in reality it takes away whatever little choice women could have had before what Elizabeth Warren has described as the two-income trap came into being.

No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children.
Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice,
precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make
that one.

PS:

Pussy Riot are too cliche, here's the new anti-establishment:

A philogynist in action against Christina Hoff Sommers:

And finally a plaintive article by a rad-fem moaning that fun-fems might do to them what (radical or real)feminists did to their predecessors:

Tuesday, 2 October 2012

Contrary to popular misconception, feminism is an old movement and was around before you or your parents were born.
So its stupid arguments such as "it's not even a century that women were allowed to vote"(and today we have a war on women!) are made stupider when you consider history. Men didn't have such privilege(err.. right?) either, but for a few decades or in many cases, a few years.

Even Saudi Arabia, yes that Saudi Arabia, supposedly the Sweden of boy-power(as a corollary of Julian Assange's claim "Sweden is the Saudi Arabia of Feminism"), which granted female suffrage recently, had its first nation-wide elections in 2004, and yes they stone men for adultery too.

Secondly, women did not "win" the right to vote. (Isn't this generalizing women and hence misogynist/sexist/paternalistic/bigotistic? Oh wait, it is feminists doing it, mmkay no problemo!)
Some women were against the suffrage and they lost. Most women didn't even care, and as Chesterton states it was a curious demand of suffragetes that women may vote for everything else but for suffrage itself:

Monday, 1 October 2012

Stephanie Coontz's recent NYT article, The Myth of Male Decline, purports to show that men aren't declining in society but are actually winning when you separate the wheat from the chaff.

For an example, she points out that it is wrong to compare men's income to women's without adjusting for the attributes such as education.

So while colleges might be 60% women, it's wrong to say that men are declining because they still earn more when you control for education. In other words, use ceteris paribus you morons(ummm wage-gap?)! Men are still winning! Still earning more dollaz for every dollar a woman makes!

Refuting her arguments isn't the objective here. It's the juxtaposition of her reasoning with "men and women are the same, especially in maths" professor Janet Hyde's reasoning of why boys get higher SAT scores. And I quote:

In 2007 the SAT was taken by 798,030 females but only 690,500 males,
a gap of more than 100,000 people. Assuming that SAT takers represent
the top portion of the performance distribution, this surplus of females
taking the SAT means that the female group dips farther down into the
performance distribution than does the male group. It is therefore not
surprising that females, on average, score somewhat lower than males.
The gender gap is likely in large part a sampling artifact.
Both bemoan dominance of men at higher echelons. Oh well...

1)The differences between the groups are much smaller than the differences amongst the groups themselves.
2)There is more overlap between two groups than non-overlap.

The first one is less disingenuous than the second, so lets start with the second one.

To do so, we first require to lay down some groundwork about statistics.

With an average male height of 5'10'' it's much easier to find men 6' or 5'8'' inches tall, than 6'10'' or 4'10''. Note that the average of both sets is 5'10''. It's an example of the common observations that more people are closer to the average than extremes when considering various human traits.

The graphic representation of this fact is the bell curve/normal distribution.

The mean(μ) being the average, and the standard deviation(σ) a measure of how spread out the distribution is. A higher mean means taller people, a higher standard deviation means more taller and shorter people than the mean.(higher SD - flatter curve, lower SD - more peaking curve)

Note that for the same difference, namely of 1 SD, there are very different proportions of people between the bounds of mean and one SD, one SD from the mean and two SD from the mean, and 2SD from the mean and 3SD from the mean, viz. 68.2%, 27.2% and 4.2% respectively.

Coming back to the argument, "there is more overlap than there is non-overlap", consider two populations whose means are separated by a difference of 2SD, but have the same number of individuals and standard deviation. They do overlap, the right half of one overlaps almost completely the left half of the other.

Using the numbers from above bell curve, there is about 52% of overlap in both the distributions.
So there is more overlap among the two groups than the their non-overlapping parts. However now consider how many of people in group 2 are above the average of the people in group 1.
While the average of group 1 is at 50th percentile, the corresponding person in the other group has to be almost at 98th percentile to make the cut.
The ratio of those making the cut from the different groups is thus almost 50:2 or 25:1.

If you increase the criteria to one SD above M1, then the ratios go to about 16:0.1 or 160:1.

The thing to realize about SAT distributions being the the jump in ratios when one goes farther at the ends of distributions. The ratio for one more SD increase, jumped from 25:1 to 160:1, i.e. a more than five-fold increase, even though the absolute numbers themselves are falling.(50% and 2.1% in the former, while 16% and 0.1% in the latter).

So while the ratio of 2.42 to 2.1 is close to 1, the ratio of 0.42 to 0.1 is more than 4.(not actual numbers). Secondly, it's easier to smother the difference when the numbers make up less than 1% of the distribution. Or even less than 0.1% (1 in 1000)
An easier test can go a long way at making the sex-differences disappear since the distributions are much closer together(the means are almost equal) and the small difference in the SD of the two distributions(men are more variable) only makes a big difference at the ends.

"Interestingly, girls flat out WHOMP boys in Chinese and English. Just sayin’."

How's that whomping in the top percentile? or even top ten percentile?

"Interestingly, the trend reverses for the relatively newer “Writing” portion of the test."

It was included precisely because of that, making the test less sexist. PSAT's writing portion has earned many more girls scholarships than doubling the weight of the verbal scores.(which funnily did nothing for the top percentile)

"However, give the large numbers, there are more than enough girls and boys to fill the positions requiring these skills."

That sheen is taken off when you consider:

"1990 In this year, ten students out of 1.2 million test takers (roughly one in 120,000 students) get perfect scores of 1600 on the SAT. ""In 1994, 25 students got perfect scores out of about 1.25 million (about 1 in 50,000 students). The first recentered SAT in April has 137 perfect scores out of about 200,000 test takers (about 1 in 1,400 students). ""Out of 1.38 million seniors taking the SAT, 238 (roughly 1 in 5,000 students) receive a perfect score of 2400. In 2004, approximately the same number of seniors took the SAT, and 939 (about 1 in 1,500 students) received a perfect score of 1600. "

The people who are in the no-maths-gap-and-due-to-sexism camp, use the fact that the boy-girl ratio used to be 13 to 1 in SAT for >700 scores and is now around 2 to 1 as proof that it can be whittled down to nothing.

"Interestingly, one could also look at post-admissions data for anti-boy bias (if admitted boys have higher scores, then perhaps they faced a higher admissions hurdle). "

That would be so if the rejected boys didn't have higher scores than rejected girls.

It's interesting to view these figures in the context of Simpson's Paradox(look for the Berkeley gender bias case at wikipedia). And that the almost-puking lady in Larry Summers's brouhaha came from MIT and Christina Sommers has written something about her past work in bringing about gender equality at MIT. And that the Dean of Admissions mentioned in above link was recruited for gender-equality, got some awards and MIT folks had a party for accomplishing this feat.

"the tendency for boys to be more likely, when down to two choices, guess and move on rather than dither"

and girls can't be taught this? For all the great steps they have taken in girl education, all that schooling changes and hard work they put in while the boys twiddle their thumbs on video games, and they can't be taught how to beat some sexist multiple-choice test!

Tuesday, 18 September 2012

Lewontin's infamous argument stated in a not so strictly accurate analogy boils down to this:

Since the height differences amongst the groups men and women are much more than the difference between them(4-5 inches) the groups themselves don't exist.

Lewontin's conclusion stated for gender would be:

“Human sexual classification is of no social value and is positively destructive of social and human relations. Since such sexual classification is now seen to be of virtually no genetic or taxonomic significance either, no justification can be offered for its continuance.”

The first sentence being implemented since the 60s culture revolution to an unsurprisingly devastating effect, the second however losing its meaning since genetic difference of sex chromosomes is not as easy to refute(and a big part of why this analogy is not 'strict').

Stated this way, one could easily see that the problem lies not with the grouping but the criteria that is being used and how it is being applied. A feminist rebuttal to the above can be that since it is gender that is socially constructed while sex is a biological fact, the fallacy should be written as :

Since the height differences amongst the groups human males and human females are much more than the difference between them(4-5 inches) the groups themselves don't exist.

Gender classification still sounds wrong. For biological things like body-shape, hormone levels that are responsible for it, fat-content, muscle mass, etc., the term used should be sex and not gender.

So how does one show that genders don't exist? That gender is nothing but a social construct?

Ms. Hyde's monumental study of male-female differences in personality, with the Gender Similarities Hypothesis comes to the conclusion that:

males and females are similar on most, but not all,
psychological variables
The work has been cited 924 times and has won Ms. Hyde not only media time but also awards in her field (her other paper regarding gender/sex differences in mathematics and science, or rather the lack thereof has been another feather in the bonnet). According to her award-winning, media-inflaming and androgynous gender warriors' go-to scientific literature when it comes to internet debates:

78% of gender differences are small or close to zero
and 22% aren't? mmkay!

....we believe we made it clear that the true extent of sex differences in human personality has been consistently underestimated.
It's funny to note that what Ms. Hyde said in her paper with the above proclamation in mind:

The Gender Differences Model, which argues that males and females are vastly different psychologically, dominates the popular media

Curiously she also makes the statement that:

"self-esteem is roughly as much of a problem for
adolescent boys as it is for adolescent girls"

So apparently AAUW study on how schools shortchange girls was wrong or a statistical outlier(they accidentally the whole data!) or maybe it has brought equality to this sphere in the space of mere 20 years!
Since feminists are never wrong and since patriarchy has been known to keep women in low spirits, the only reasonable explanation is that equality has succeeded. Girls have overcome the trauma of becoming women!
Progress, comrade! Human nature has been modified, estrogen shock has been minimized and testosterone has been reined in, Vive la révolution!

Or boys are now as neurotic as teenage girls, still who cares! Equality! Equality!

Monday, 17 September 2012

The title is a riff on Hana Rosin's 'End of Men' series. Not much about her or her theories is discussed though.
In her latest column she writes of women's 'adaptability', however, copying men's identity is more like it, and hence the end of women.